On Loyalty and the Quiet Companionship of Pippen

I have a cosmopolitan friend who, by the mercy of chance — that discreet and impartial arbiter of destinies — was born in Serbia. Industrious beyond measure, he treats work not merely as obligation but as a quiet philosophy, a means of aligning oneself with the silent order of things. And he is a companion of a rare kind: steadfast, discerning, and, above all, loyal.

His name is Pippen.

We first crossed paths in the now-vanished days of Google+ — that fleeting agora where, for a moment, the world’s geeks entertained the gentle delusion that they might, in time, inherit the Earth. It was an age of bright aspiration, tinged with naïveté, yet marked by a peculiar fellowship that transcended all borders and conventions.

Among Pippen’s many virtues, loyalty stands pre-eminent. Not the clamorous, performative loyalty so fashionable in this restless age, but the quieter, unwavering kind — the loyalty of one who stays. It is revealed not in grand gestures but in small, consistent acts that might easily go unnoticed, were they not the very scaffolding of true friendship.

He is that rare confidant who will, from time to time, confront me with affectionate exasperation. He often remarks, with wry bemusement, that my writing leaves too much unsaid — too open-ended, he says, too much entrusted to the reader’s inference. And in this, he is not mistaken. Yet it is no oversight but a deliberate design. I write not to dictate but to invite; not to conclude, but to offer beginnings.

He will, as is his habit, grumble. Yet even as he protests, he reads. Reluctantly, perhaps, but with the quiet understanding that a writer without a reader is, in some essential sense, a heathen — a wanderer without ritual or witness. And he knows, too, a wisdom deeper still: those blessed with loyal friends shall never die heathen.